In the interpretation of dreams, Tree is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as growth, life, rootedness, the self, and the connection of realms.
Common readings
The tree, rooted below and reaching above, is a widespread image of life and growth and, in Jungian reading, of the self that unites the depths and the heights.
The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.
What changes the reading
The tree's condition is the reading's spine. A tree in leaf, in fruit, bare for winter, felled, uprooted or struck by lightning are distinct images, and interpreters put weight on whether the damage is seasonal or final, a bare tree implying return where an uprooted one does not. Climbing a tree, sheltering under it and planting one give the dreamer three different relations to what it stands for. Where the dream shows roots and crown together, the doubled direction of the image, downward inheritance and upward growth, is usually taken as its point.